Seattle.BloggersPub

Interesting post over at HorsePigCow predicting the demise of the browser (along with a pretty swanky cemetery picture). She has some good thoughts about why browsers are dead and why they’re being misused today. I’ve always felt that we are doing too much within the browser. Ajax is a great technology, but it relies too […]

This was too good not to post. Over on Yay Hooray they are redoing famous company’s logos and giving them a web 2.0 feel. Health put this one for Adobe together.

If you haven’t seen the news, last night Gotuit Media announced Gotuit.com, an on-demand, broadband video portal that is probably one of the coolest Flash RIAs that I’ve seen. Instead of sites like YouTube and MySpace that use Flash to show videos, Gotuit has built an entire application in Flash around viewing the clips.

What makes Gotuit interesting is that it isn’t user-driven, they have actually gone out and gotten content. You can see the news, listen to music videos, check out sports clips. As Michael Arrington says, this application furthers television’s demise. It is a great example of how Flash can be used not only to deliver multimedia, but deliver an entire experience around that multimedia. It is one of the selling points of the platform, and Gotuit does it very well. Richard McManus has some great info on the launch.

Okay, I said it. Adobe should buy Jumpcut (obligatory TechCrunch profile here. I had taken a quick peek at Jumpcut when they arrived on the scene, but I didn’t really dig in until I got an email from an old colleague at Wharton the other day. It’s an impressive application both for its target audience as well as its technical merit. As far as RIAs go this is the real deal - something that could just as easily be an intro-level video editing application for the desktop.

Which is why Adobe should buy them. Jumpcut would make a perfect compliment to their video suite, and with Adobe’s inside video knowledge could become a very powerful tool for the white-hot online video market. Buying Jumpcut would give Adobe a complimentary product to Pemiere and would target a less professional market - the kind with low costs and high margins. Combine that with the fact that it’s running Flash and outputting Flash video and this has Adobe written all over it.

Jumpcut could gain a lot from Adobe’s technical video talents and Adobe would gain a lot from Jumpcut’s head start. Besides, all of the other kids in the Valley are buying Web 2.0 start ups, why not Adobe?

Interesting commentary on “The Webtop vs. the Desktop” and what it means for both users and data storage. It draws from a panel at Supernova that Kevin Lynch was invovled in and it’s something that RIA developers increasingly need to take into consideration.

We’re still working on the problem of synchronizing data online/offline, but the storage issue looms large. Will users be comfortable having all of their information stored online? I think so, but RIA developers need to take pains to ensure that the data is secure and trust is not misplaced.

I’m with Gary of Goowy - I think users simply want access to their data and don’t care where it is. Those who have embraced “web 2.0″ services like Flickr and del.icio.us seem to be okay with that, but I realize there is a big difference between bookmarks and a letter to your spouse.

Not quite, but JamJar comes pretty close to it. According to Sean, it was built by the team here in Seattle, which means that there are Adobe folks doing Flex up here.

To be totally honest, when I logged into JamJar for the first time, I was unimpressed. I saw a lot of praise from Alistair and Schematic but when I logged in the interface overwhelmed me and I was confused as to what exactly I was supposed to be using it for.

I know it’s a concept, and I think part of the problem is that I don’t have any friends, but I’m still not entirely sold. I plan to keep using it and watching it grow, because all of the concepts behind it are sound, and it has some cool technological implementations. But as of right now, I don’t know that I’d eagerly point to it as a good Flex 2 example. Maybe I’m missing something.

Overall, I think it has a lot of potential, so I don’t want people to come away thinking I hated it. For me, the interface seemed cluttered, it was tough to use, and I didn’t have any friends. It’s a very collaborative site, and I’m sure that in a team environment (which is how it’s supposed to be used) it could be very effective. It shows off some cool Flex 2 technology, but I wish they would have made it a bit easier for a friendless loser like me to get the full experience.

As you may have noticed, I place a lot of emphasis on things like techmeme and digg because that’s where the first adopters hang out. When you’re doing something new, you need to get those people the information because they’re the ones who will be most open to trying new things. If they like what they see, your job is much easier. Some people may not think that, but regardless, I wanted to highlight this.

There’s a little community of Adobe followers over on digg, and they do a good job of submitting Adobe related stories to digg. Most of these stories don’t hit the front page, and I think sometimes that’s too bad (other times they don’t deserve to be there). So if you’re on digg, add some of the Adobe crowd to your friends list. It’s easy to see what stories they’ve dugg or submitted and help push things to the top. this post has a pretty good collection of Adobe-related folks who are on digg. So if you’re already using digg, and you like what Adobe is doing, help share it with the digerati.

There has been a lot of buzz around Joe’s Goals which is an elegant, clean, Ajax app written with ColdFusion. The idea is simple: you can track a series of positive or negative goals and then track how you’re doing. You can also share the goals with friends which goes a long way towards keeping on top of them. It’s a great example of ColdFusion and Ajax and I thought some of you might enjoy it.